Celebrating 10 years: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is now 10.

That’s an amazing accomplishment in the tech world, and an inspiration to startups around the globe. Hootsuite is the pioneer and leader in social media management, with some of the most high-profile clients you could imagine.

They’ve done it all. Big-time clients. Major awards. Global growth.

Oh, and they’re as proudly Canadian as we are.

We’re excited to work with them and help usher in another 10 years of success, and more.

To hear their full story, check out this quick video.

Remember 2008?

Some relatively unknown Illinois Senator with a funny name was running for president. Jim and Pam were still seeing other people on The Office. And there was a very good chance that you (or at least your parents) weren’t on Facebook. You definitely weren’t on Instagram, since it wouldn’t exist for another two years.

Social media and the “web 2.0” movement (remember that?) were still in their early days. It was a more innocent time—people were still more interested in sharing vacation pictures and seeing what their old high school crushes were up to than they were in eroding the pillars of democracy and spreading anti-vaccination propaganda. But Hootsuite Founder and CEO Ryan Holmes saw the writing on the wall:

Social media was becoming a force of nature, and people were going to need to manage their presence on more than one channel. Holmes and his partners owned a digital advertising agency, and as they started looking for ways to help their clients manage their social media presences, they created the groundwork for Hootsuite.

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The truth was we started Hootsuite as a way to scratch our own itch,” said Holmes, “At the time, we were running social media accounts for a lot of brands and it was a struggle to keep track of all the logins across all of their accounts. We thought there must be a better way, and when we discovered there wasn’t, we built it.

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Hootsuite is Born

Holmes named seven employees from the agency to focus on this new social media management project. Together, they launched Hootsuite on November 28, 2008 as a free, cloud-based dashboard for social media managers.

And it took off—even though the mobile version wouldn’t show up until 2009 (remember, the iPhone was introduced to the world in 2007, so mobile apps were still very much a new thing in 2008.)

By 2010, a million people were using Hootsuite, making it the top social media management tool in the world.

But the journey was just beginning. Over the next several years, Hootsuite would grow to be used by more than 18 million customers, including the overwhelming majority of Fortune 1000 companies. Those seven initial Hootsuite employees would become more than 1,000. And what started in Vancouver would come to have 12 offices around the globe.

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Happy 10th Birthday, Hootsuite!

The Hootsuite story is an exceptional one—truly one of the tech industry’s greatest success stories. It’s rare for a company to survive 10 years, but rarer by far to become the most popular offering in your field (and the world’s leading social suite).

We’re so happy to play a role in the success of Hootsuite, and we’re excited to see what they have in store for the next 10 years!

Speaking of which, they’ve already started laying out their plans in their Future of Social events. This series delves into their plans and predictions for the next 10 years of social media. What happens as artificial intelligence becomes more prominent in our daily lives? How will we solve the problems of malicious misinformation and privacy violations that seem to be plaguing the most popular social platforms? What will it take for advertisers to stay relevant and relatable as the social landscape changes?

These are the things the minds at Hootsuite are already exploring as they look to the future. And if their success so far is any indicator, they’ll be one of the leading voices in shaping social media for years to come.

So happy birthday, Hootsuite, and here’s to many more years of success!